One of the greatest advantages of using Cygwin is the vast array of softwares at your disposal. There is a lot of choice, perhaps too much of choice. And we will have to get used to that.
Take text editors for instance. A text editor is a very basic software and there has been such evolution in them. Line editors, text editors, GUI editors,… and with various advanced features.
ed is the GNU line editor. cat used to concatenate files can be seen as an editor as well.
Joe, Pico and Nano are screen editors with more features than the plain line editors. …read more

We have seen a few things about the .profile while customizing the Cygwin terminal. Here are the remaining sections of the file.
Prompt
export PS1=”\[\e]2;\u@\h:\w\007$green\]\u@\h:\[$pink\]\w\[$blue\]$ \[$BLUE\]”
The PS1 is a defined environment variable that determines how a prompt should behave. It stands for “Prompt Settings”. There are three variables \u, \h, and a \w. \u is the username, \h is the hostname, \w is the complete path of the working directory. The pre-defined colors $green, $pink, $blue, $BLUE (set in the .profile shown) specify the color of the display immediately following. Notice that PS1 seems to have a repetition of \u, \h and …read more

 
Cygwin loads its settings from a file called .profile present in the HOME environment variable. By default, HOME is set to /home/<username> which in Windows can be reached in C:\cygwin\home\<username> (assuming you have installed Cygwin in C:\cygwin folder).
.profile can be opened using any text editor. Here you can set colors to be displayed, prompt, history, aliases, default working directory, and any banner you may wish. The colors you choose will interfere with the colors set in your command prompt.
Below is a sample .profile.
————————————————————————————————–
# .profile
# Define some colors first:
red=’\e[0;31m'
RED='\e[1;31m'
green='\e[0;32m'
GREEN='\e[1;32m'
yellow='\e[0;33m'
YELLOW='\e[1;33m'
blue='\e[0;34m'
BLUE='\e[1;34m'
pink='\e[0;35m'
PINK='\e[1;35m'
cyan='\e[0;36m'
CYAN='\e[1;36m'
NC='\e[0m'
# Colors and Prompt
export PS1="\[\e]2;\u@\h:\w\007$green\]\u@\h:\[$pink\]\w\[$blue\]$ \[$BLUE\]“          # Word wrap of previous line.
set -o …read more

I started this month as the new damn PC guy and ended it by buying a Dell Inspiron Mini 9 in one of the Black Friday deals though I wish I had won a PC in a giveaway.
I had been opinionated about using push buttons and organizing program files, worried about the rising types of blog fraud and spam mail, conscious about the precautions to be taken in a cyber cafe and disposing e-waste responsibly, sad about the layoffs and the Mumbai attacks, and excited about the Ancient Rome 3D and the LIFE photo archive projects. I also began an ongoing …read more

Installing Cygwin is straightforward, but those who haven’t installed any UNIX-based OSs before may be lost at the last step. So here are the steps:
1. Download the Cygwin setup file, if you haven’t already.
2. Choose the installation type: Install from Internet or Install from Local Directory or Download without Installing. When installing Cygwin for the first time, you’ll have to choose either the first or the last option unless you already have the packages through some other means. I tend to choose the last for two reasons. One, network issues while downloading are preferrable to network issues while installing. Two, a …read more

Previously, I wrote that Cygwin provides an alternative to the windows shell, makes Unix-lovers feel more at home with Windows and vice-versa. That is only the partial truth.
The truth is Cygwin emulates Linux on Windows. If you replace the Windows background with any of the open-source wallpapers, hide the Windows task bar, and only run the cygwin terminal, you can almost cheat yourself that you’re running a Unix-based OS. This is thanks to a DLL named cygwin1.dll which is the actual Linux API emulation layer.
Cygwin is different from other utility packages providing Unix-like functionality like, say, UnxUtils because of the …read more

The Windows operating system is very different from most other operating systems. Red Hat Linux, GNU/Linux, Ubuntu, Debian, SUSE share some core philosophies with UNIX, and are thus called Unix-based OSs. In that way, they all follow a common set of standards which are very unlike Windows’ own and that is one of the reasons for the wide-spread anti-Windows sentiment.
Windows is primarily popular for its apparent user-friendliness. Unix-based OSs are chosen for their open and active communities. Windows is sufficient for ‘general purposes’ like listening to songs, playing games, making documents, sending mail, browsing the Internet. Unix-based OSs may seem more …read more